Ubuntu turns 20: 'Oracular Oriole' shows this old bird's still got plenty of flight

The 24.10 release offers fun and freshness, but not immutability

The first interim release of Ubuntu since the somewhat troubled Noble Numbat is a smooth upgrade - but not all of the new hotness is here yet.

Ubuntu 24.10 is out, with several acknowledgments that this release marks 20 years of the Ubuntu project.

For a glimpse of what's new, we looked at the beta of the flagship desktop version last month. It uses Canonical's slightly-tweaked version of GNOME version 47, but with a few refinements, such as a permanent dock – by default on the left – desktop icons, improved window tiling, and a few other refinements.

In this release, Ubuntu's customizations to GNOME get their own section in the Settings application, and the dock shows progress bars as snap-packaged apps are updated. Ubuntu's App Center can now handle traditional Debian packages as well as snaps, and there's a new Security Center. So far, there's not much in it, but this release brings more fine-grained control of permissions on an app-by-app basis.

The other flavors of Ubuntu have naturally all had updates too. Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.10 still uses the same version 6.0.4 desktop as the previous release, although some underlying Cinnamon components have been updated to newer ones from version 6.2. Ubuntu MATE 24.10 too hasn't updated past MATE 1.26.2, due to persistent issues with MATE 1.28, but this release is a much smaller download.

There hasn't been a new release of the Unity desktop since Unity 7.7, so Ubuntu Unity 24.10 has the same desktop – but this release switches to the Calamares installer. There's also a new version of the experimental Ubuntu Lomiri, with the former Unity 8, which we last looked at in May. We upgraded a newly-installed Ubuntu Unity 24.04 machine, and it went perfectly smoothly and runs fine. A last-minute reversion means its login screen isn't the prettiest, but it's perfectly functional.

Noble Numbat was an LTS release, so both Kubuntu and Lubuntu 24.04 were stuck with older, stable releases of their respective desktops – but both have upgraded them now. Kubuntu 24.10 comes with KDE Plasma 6.1, and Lubuntu 24.10 sports the shiny LXQt 2.0.0 we looked at in April.

Less typically, Xubuntu 24.10 has gone with a development release, Xfce 4.19. Presumably this is solid, as Xfce 4.20 is expected in December. Also refreshed is Ubuntu Budgie 24.10, but only moderately: it comes with Budgie 10.9.2, which is a new release, but only a minor one.

As we covered back in August, Canonical has changed its kernel version selection policy, and that bears fruit in this release: all the 24.10 editions come with the latest kernel 6.11, released at the end of last month.

There is also a 24.10 release of Ubuntu Server – but most people want stability and reliability from their servers, and interim releases aren't ideal for that. This download page calls out:

   •  Addition of kdump-tools for automatic kernel crash dumps
   •  Inclusion of Valkey, a high performance key/value data store
   •  Toolchain updates now include versioned Rust packages and TCK certified OpenJDK 21 and 17

Sadly missing from this release cycle is the new Core Desktop variant, which was planned to début in 2024. The Reg FOSS desk plans to be at the Ubuntu Summit later this month and we will be talking to the team about the status of Canonical's immutable desktop OS.

Waxing Warthog-nostalgic

As we reported earlier last month, there are also some retro nods to the product's early beginnings in its first ever release, 4.10 "Warty Warthog". If you didn't board the Ubuntu train so early, this 2020 retrospective review and this 2023 one will give you a taste.

In a time when most OSes were either grey- or blue-themed, Ubuntu's chocolate-brown look was very distinctive. "Oracular" offers a version of the original brown gradient-fill wallpaper with an updated logo, an optional brown accent color in GNOME, and the original startup sound – although not the tribal drums sound for which we personally were nostalgic.

"Warty" was the release that caused this vulture to immediately switch from SUSE Linux Professional: the new distro was smaller, faster, and offered Debian's apt-get package handling tool, which was vastly superior to the plain rpm command that was all the bigger, slower SUSE offered back then.

SUSE, like its near-contemporary Red Hat Linux, hailed from the era before home broadband was common. SUSE's selling point was that it came with several thick paper manuals in the box, plus half a dozen or so CDs (later, DVDs) containing all the software you might ever want on it.

Ubuntu took a different approach: like the UserLinux project just before it, it took the formidably hard-to-install Debian and wrapped it in an easy installer, which asked the minimum of questions. Rather than giving you the choice of what apps you wanted – which all free distros did back then, but which required considerable knowledge to choose – Ubuntu delivered a curated collection of software. Its maintainers picked the one best FOSS app they could from each category, eliminating duplication or tricky manual selection: you got one desktop (GNOME 2), one web browser (Firefox), one office suite (OpenOffice), and so on. The result fitted onto a single CD with so much room to spare that the rest of the space was filled up with Windows installers for all the main applications, so that you could get familiar with them on your existing OS before switching to Linux.

If you wanted other components, they were all there in online repositories, accessible via Debian's superior apt-get package handling tool, which did automatic dependency management, unlike the bare rpm command, which was all that SUSE or Red Hat Linux offered back then. At that time, the Reg FOSS desk was reveling in the raw speed of a 512 kbps ADSL connection through an Alcatel Speed Touch modem. Picking some packages might result in half an hour of downloading and installing dependencies, but at least it all happened automatically. In all the other consumer-friendly free distros of 2004, you'd have to work out which dependencies you needed yourself, make a list, individually download them, install each one separately by hand in the correct order, and then finally your desired package.

Debian automated all this stuff away, but itself was so complicated to install that only Linux gurus could use it. There were several easier-to-use distros that simplified things, such as SUSE Linux Professional, Caldera OpenLinux, Xandros Linux (which took over Corel LinuxOS), and Lindows OS, but almost all of them were commercial: you had to buy them.

What was radical about Ubuntu was that it was as easy as the professional, paid-for products, but it was free of charge. You could even request a copy online and the company would post the CDs to you for free, a service Canonical called ShipIt.

All this was paid for by "Self-appointed benevolent dictator for life" Mark Shuttleworth, who sold his South African startup Thawte for about $550 million in 1999.

As we said when the Debian celebrated its 30th birthday, as far as anyone can tell, the Debian family dominates the Linux market in number of systems, and Ubuntu is the majority of that – about two-thirds of it.

Microsoft still dominates the desktop: Ubuntu hasn't conclusively closed its bug #1 yet. ChromeOS is doing well, and the Steam Deck has put Arch Linux in the hands of that most Windows-centric community, PC gamers. But none of those existed when Ubuntu started, and we think it's due to the credit for being the project that first brought Debian to the masses. Congratulations and happy 20th, Ubuntu.